Sometimes the oddest Avios redemptions can be the best value!

Sometimes, though, you can get great value in very obscure circumstances. I just saved myself £1,000 over the weekend!

We are currently finalising our family holiday for the Summer. My wife has already booked us into a family focussed hotel in the Dolomites near Innsbruck for a week. Because she wants a two week break from the office, she wanted to add a week in Mallorca beforehand. (You can the German out of Germany but …..)

This meant that we needed to get from Mallorca to Innsbruck on a fixed day in August. You can imagine, when I typed that request into Expedia, I wasn’t very hopeful.

I then saw the price. €331 per person, one way. Impressive pricing for a ‘budget’ airline but it is a Saturday in August. And I didn’t have many alternatives.

airberlin, of course, is a oneworld alliance member. This means that I can books its flights with Avios points on ba.com.

More out of hope than anything else, I went onto ba.com to see what was available. Amazingly, there were SIX economy seats available for Avios on the flight.

I promptly booked four of them!

I was going to pay (€331 x 4) €1,324 which is £1,040.

I paid 30,000 Avios plus £35.

And you can’t argue with that.

I now need to get to the bottom of whether, despite having BA status, I need to pay for a NIKI seat reservation. The evidence is confusing although the airberlin website thinks I should. That is a problem for another day though.

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Comments

Excellent use of points 🙂 We used NIKI for a flight from MXP-VIE a while back (paid flight, it was very cheap). The weird thing is it was a Meridiana codeshare, which gave us seat selection and checked bags for free, whereas booking on NIKI we would have had to pay for all that. Check in was handled by AB, so we used my QF Plat (OWE) card to get priority check in. The in-flight experience was good, the hosties were young Austrian girls wearing jeans which made for a casual atmosphere, but in a good way. I think there was a snack and drink but can’t remember – you can preorder decent food though. The downside was that they lost our bags, and you get directed to AB for that – who are notoriously awful at handling lost baggage. We only got our bags after 4 days by leveraging a contact at the airport. Good luck and hope the holiday goes well!

I had a similar experience with BA. My partner needed a return flight from Edinburgh to Bangkok on specific weekend dates to meet commitments both here and in Thailand, and as usal insisted on BA (yes really!). After( a lot of grumbling I burned 111000 avios plus almost £1100 booking the flight far in advance, a CW redemption out and WTP-CW UUA for the return. In my view it was a total waste of avios given revenue fares available on other carriers at the time. However, as it happened, the flight filled up fast and soon after booking BA were already charging an astonishing £2000 WT and over £6000 CW for flexible tickets on the same dates. I still think it is a bad option compared to competitors revenue fares but at east now take some comfort that I got great vkue ehen compared to BAs own revenue fares for the flight.

Less obscure, but I was surprised how cheap US domestic redemptions on AA are compared to back home.
Also I can highly recommend the Es Molí hotel in Deia if you’re looking for somewhere to stay in Mallorca. Deia is a beautiful village too, give it a go.

V impressive! I just booked 3 tickets from my local airport DSA to jersey middle of August to visit family. Fully expecting to get nothing locally on flybe I couldn’t believe it there was 9 plus seats most days. Even Saturday had 4 seats showing on avios.com. Cash price for the hop would have been close to £500 with a bag , but 27k avios and £100 was a fair price to me. Threw in another 5k avios I got a car from Avis for £75, cash price £175. So all in I hit 3 flights plus car for a week for £175 in August in jersey. I was pleased to use on a route I expected availability to be be on existent on. Only negative is I had to pay for seat selection to be certain sitting together.

Avios on line chat also told me that I can use for Thomson package holidays didn’t know about that!

I recently had to fly my wife and daughter from Hanoi to Tokyo in Business class (my daughter had had knee surgery and needed a flat bed configuration seat). The one-way JAL flights were an eye-watering £1100 each. I paid 37500 Avios and £20 for each flight.

OT Flights begin from Inverness to Heathrow today. Had a look at using Inverness as a starting point for next years USA trip but the 10 am flight back to Inverness is no good for connecting overnight flights.

Yes I did price it back to EDI and it worked out cheaper but it would mean then having to get the train up to Inverness and then hoofing it back to Dundee from EDI with a ton of luggage after spending a month in the USA either on the train or paying for a taxi which in total would just about cancel out any savings. Mind you I would save the cost of airport parking for a month – will look again!

You could do a ow avis rental and drop off at airport, alternatively europcar and drop off at Jurys Inn (former thistle). Frequent bust to airport from road right besides the hotel. We gave up on the luggage hassle years ago, now strictly handbaggge only. The convenience is worth the cost of hotel laundry service for us.

Friends of mine with BA status generally got free seat selection when booking NIKI flights on Airberlin, so should be possible for you, too.

Apart from at certain times, when a special offer is running, Airberlin/Niki don’t seem to allow you to buy one-way flights for half the price of a return. Hence the expensive figure you got – a return would have been significantly cheaper – probably even less than what you were quoted for a one-way. Makes it a very good use of Avios, as you say.

Yes, that was the case on another route that I use a lot (DUS-ZRH) but they stopped it and now offer sensible one way pricing. I’ve got a lot of value within Europe on short notice one way redemptions on both AB and IB.

I think I may of trumped you here Raffles with a flight to Mallorca as well amazingly enough. We are going for a couple of weeks later in the year, but some friends of ours that sometimes come with us on holiday were not sure if they could make it at the time of booking.

When they found out they could make the dates, flights with reasonable times and preferably from Heathrow were coming up pretty steep. I managed to find a return flight on Iberia that worked out £138 for two adults, one child and an infant. As that’s including hold bags that in itself was a pretty good deal.

I then used some BA Avios for their flight out. There was only Club Europe available but as it was off peak so this worked out a reasonable 39525 miles and £81 in taxes. The cash equivalent (although we would never had paid this) was £1766 which works out over 4.2p per Avios!

Remember, though, that the value is immaterial if you wouldn’t actually pay the cash. I suspect that Raffles WOULD have paid the cash fares if there had been no Avios availability – after all, it would only be the equivalent of a night or two in Dubai for him! :))

Rob, would QR not recognise your status as an AB booking and allow you to reserve the seats? One time we just couldn’t get our AB status recognised by QR but eventually it worked out. Just checking in case anyone else has similar bookings in future. Are they supposed to recognise all OW bookings, or does this not come into the OW category. Confusing, to say the least!

I haven’t covered it for 16 months so perhaps I should do a new article. Note that the Jumeirah conversion rate has now changed since they revamped the scheme and you now get 1 Sirius point for every 4 MR points.

References to a 60% bonus in that article should now be read as a 40% bonus due to the collapse in the £/$ exchange rate!

So …. 100,000 UK Amex points would get you 140,000 IDC Amex points which would get you 35,000 Jumeirah Sirius.

Agree with many of the comments above – we booked a £1200 Cathay business ticket HKG-BKK for 30000 Avios and £27 each! Saving £2400 for 60000 Avios – pretty hard to beat and a chance to enjoy Cathay’s superior (vs BA Club Europe) regional business seat & service!

Would you honestly be willing to pay £1200 for a 2.5 hour one-way flight in J? You can buy a return flight to BKK from the UK in J for sub £1200 in a QR sale. My personal valuation would put this around 1p/avios at best.

Yep but we do like to theoretically pat ourselves on the back & where’s the harm in that? There’s generally a decent value saving, at heart. If not the huge one sometimes claimed 🙂

On my regular route to our place in the sun, they have gone sticky about CE fares – you won’t get them for less than £500 @ T-355 or anything in peak (school hols).

But you can easily get them for 15,000 Avios + fees – MASSIVE saving!

On principle, I wouldn’t do that for a 2 hr flight. Except – they have also just gone sticky on Economy pricing in Peak (yikes!). £125 or £150 gets close to 15,000 Avios + fee.

And we need 5 tickets! (Only 4 Avios redemptions in Economy).

So I came pretty close to getting a CE redemption for Easter back next Easter, not much in it but at the end of the day the £ difference swung it, I couldn’t drink anything in the lounge to justify it as a 4 hr drive awaits.

I see your point, the “harm” is if you have a limited pool of avios you could be better using them elsewhere, a real valuation helps to maximize your return. I agree though that it feels nice to see the saving against full-price, it’s a similar feeling to buying a discounted sofa for £500 against a MSRP of £2000 (hence why the retailers do it!)

The HKG-BKK example is interesting as you can buy one-way flights in J on Hong Kong Airlines for sub £200 on most dates. Granted it’s not Cathay, but it’s not Y either!

O/T – I received an email today from Amex/Kaligo with regards to bonus avios on top of usual avios earned for hotel stays. spend £250 – 5000 avios, £500 – 10,000 and a spend of £1000 gets you 20,000 avios.

What I want to know is.. Does it all have to be on the one hotel? or can it be over various, like the last bonus offer they did?

I priced up our HKT hotel for nov, and it was £300 more than booking.com, the exact amount I would buy those avios20k for, or in and around that. But it was refundable for a change. They are often more strict regards refundable bookings.

I agree James, last year we managed about 40k bonus by dividing up our booking into three chunks. It worked well as the pricing was competitive. It’s just this time it’s more expensive. I always check them first, actually.

I don’t know if you’ve ever looked in to it Raffles; but the train Innsbruck to Zurich is stunning and pretty decently priced. Not sure how old the kids are but it creates further options, and adventure, for travel to/from Innsbruck … and airports to consider.

Can anyone beat the value I got for my flights to Nice for the Monaco Grand Prix? 9,000 avios + £35 RFS for flights initially quoted at £956 (10p per Avios) return but now over £1040 (11p per Avios)! If I was paying cash I’d probably have paid £300-£400 for an indirect flight from BHX but even so that’s 3-4p per Avios.

I think I’m in the top 10 at least: Had to fly Hong Kong to Chongqing during Chinese New Year (only a 2.5 hour flight), and the low cost airlines had sold out months in advance. The cheapest seat left on Dragonair was quoted as £1,600 in economy (this was only 3 weeks before departure). Booked for 2500 Avios + £52.30 tax instead!